COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE ? THE KEY TO SUCCESS

Competitive intelligence as part of knowledge management is still in its infancy. This paper aims to identify the critical success factors and best practices of competitive intelligence through analyzing the experiences of several organizations. The paper starts by defining what is knowledge can bring, and follows on by over viewing the competitive intelligence used in order to identifying best practices. The second part is concerned with presenting a set of examples that underline certain aspects of CI. The analysis examined the decisions pursued, IT support used, results achieved, and the perceived critical success factors. This analysis allowed the proposal of several ‘beat practices’ for successful competitive intelligence, which are presented and discussed.